1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to software design for component based computing solutions and more particularly to visual modeling of a component based architecture.
2. Description of the Related Art
As businesses and consumers become further interconnected through computer communications networks such as the global Internet and local intranets, the commerce sites and companion computing applications which integrate interactions between businesses and consumers alike are becoming ever more complex. Addressing the explosion of business to business and business to consumer interactions on-line, information technologists increasingly focus on architecting and implementing complete commerce site solutions to reflect the entire life cycle of a business in lieu of integrating multiple, disparate applications which when combined reflect the business life cycle. Consequently, as modern commerce sites can be both large and distributed, commerce systems have been configured to deploy complete e-commerce systems in as seamless a fashion as possible.
It is now a common trend that traditional, stand-alone, commerce oriented applications are produced from one or more components which can be individually re-used to create business processes for different solutions. Each of these components can expose itself as a set of reusable business functions, also referred to as “services” comporting with computing standards for deploying enterprise level logic that facilitate an open service oriented architecture (SOA). An SOA essentially can be defined as a system where all exposed business and technical functions are in the form of reusable services. These reusable services can communicate with each other to engage either in simple data passing between two or more services, or in activity coordination by two or more services.
In a SOA, a client can invoke an operation on a service to perform a function and, optionally the client can receive a response. Invoked services are generally business functions configured to fulfill the needs of business customers, whether those customers are individual consumers or other businesses. The functions can be grouped into various services where each service can specialize in functions such as catalog management, shopping cart management, credit card transaction processing, sales tax computation and the like. By utilizing an SOA, services in a commerce solution can interoperate with other business processes in a larger commerce solution involving one or more separate business entities and one or more separate consumer entities.
The design and development of traditional and SOA components and solutions currently is mainly focused on addressing the functional and non-functional aspects like performance, availability, security and the like. For example the architecture analysis may focus on optimizing the granularity of a particular component, the layering of the components appropriately, ensuring high cohesion of the component, ensuring loose coupling, defining decisions to have for example one operation per service component or multiple per service component, and forming the modules to be hosted in virtual machines and related bindings. Yet, the foregoing elements focus upon the nature of the model to be deployed and not the consumption of energy resulting from the deployment of the model. Studies have shown that for maintaining the energy of one kilowatt per hour released in a data center hosting a computing cluster supporting a component based solution, seven tenths to eight tenths of a kilowatt hour will be consumed in supporting cooling of the data center.